The International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) facilitates cooperation between scientific communications stakeholders. In 2021, ICSTI focused on initiating new partnerships and renewing old ones to foster a greater and more diverse membership, and to move beyond mere cooperation to collaboration and mutual benefit amongst ICSTI members and partners. Look at their brand new website!
The InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) study is gauging the extent and impact of predatory practices, identifying their root causes, and reviewing efforts to combat them. This study is led by an independent working group of international experts, counting notably Rabab Ahmed Rashwan, head of the ISSN National Centre Egypt. A vital part of the study is a survey for all members of the research community to raise their awareness of predatory journals and conferences across different geographies, disciplines and career stages. The IAP study will report at the end of 2021 and is anticipated to inform a further major study on research evaluation, which lies at the heart of many of the global research community’s challenges and for which predatory practices are a symptom.
Jean-Claude Guédon, Professeur honoraire at the University of Montreal, Canada, proposes to explore how scholarly publishing should relate to scholarly communication. Ostensibly aligned, publishing and communication have diverged. Journals and the concept of the “version of record” are not only a legacy of print, but their roles have changed: certain processes of scholarly publishing stand in the way of optimal scholarly communication. Taking full advantage of digital affordances requires moving in different directions. Platforms and “record of versions” will eventually supersede journals and their articles, and now is the time to make some fundamental choices.
The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) have announced a three-year collective action agreement that provides multi-year support for DOAJ from all fifteen member libraries. The BTAA is delighted to take collective action on behalf of its members to support DOAJ’s mission to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals. With this agreement, the libraries of the BTAA affirm their principled commitment to open scholarship for worldwide public good and a more equitable society.
When you are checking a journal, three of the initial checks to carry out are to find out if the ISSN number a publisher is using is recognized by the ISSN Portal. You may also check whether they are members of COPE and DOAJ. The Predatory Publishing team has developed a web page that enables you to check whether a journal is recognized by these organizations. This tool allows you to do an aggregated search of the three websites at once. The URL to access the web page is https://predatory-publishing.com/ISSNCheck/?issn=1234-5678. Please note you have to replace the ISSN at the end of the link with the ISSN you are looking up.
The Russian Federation has declared 2021 as a year of Science and Technology – which predicts an increase in the sphere of scientific publications, writes Julia Peregudova.
According to the SCImago Journal & Country Rank, Russia is 10th in the list of countries in terms of published documents in 2019. However, there are many obstacles that non-English speaking authors face before the successful publication in international journals.
The widely used academic database Scopus hosts papers from more than 300 potentially ‘predatory’ journals that have questionable publishing practices, an analysis has found. Their presence on Scopus and other popular research databases raises concerns that poor-quality studies could mislead scientists and pollute the scientific literature. Scopus has stopped adding content from most of the flagged titles for re-evaluation. But an analysis titled Predatory publishing in Scopus: evidence on cross-country differences published in Scientometrics highlights how poor-quality science is infiltrating literature. The authors of this study conclude that Scopus needs to find a way to fact-check whether the journal adheres to the declared editorial practices, including most prominently how the peer-review process is performed in practice.
The journal brand has proven to be the great intangible asset of the scholarly publisher. It signals trust and authority to authors and readers alike. Nevertheless, looking ahead, there are real tensions emerging in how the scholarly record will be structured and who will have ownership and control over it. What are the opportunities and challenges as publishers seek to extend the reach — and value — of their journal brands by supporting research materials beyond the version of record? Digging into the evolving context of preprints and research data offers valuable clues.
In scholarly publishing, blacklists aim to register fraudulent or deceptive journals and publishers, also known as “predatory”, to minimise the spread of unreliable research and the growing of fake publishing outlets. However, blacklisting remains a very controversial activity for several reasons. Cabell’s paywalled blacklist service attempts to review fraudulent journals on the basis of transparent criteria and to provide allegedly up-to-date information at the journal entry level. A team of academic librarians tested Cabell’s blacklist to analyse whether or not it could be adopted as a reliable tool by stakeholders in scholarly communication. They expose their methodology and conclude with recommendations and suggestions that could help improve Cabell’s blacklist service.
